Alex Buckley, General Manager for EMEA & APAC at DispatchTrack, talks about how they help retailers keep their delivery promises while highlighting a key partner with Furniture Village.
When it comes to delivery, mapping out the route is crucial, which is where DispatchTrack enter the journey. Their last mile delivery software offers furniture sellers AI-powered route optimisation, plus many more benefits to help maximise logistics and customer satisfaction.
In a nutshell, DispatchTrack aims to enhance the customer experience and streamline driver management through its delivery tracking tools that are designed to ensure highly accurate ETAs, maximise stops per day and minimise disruptions. In fact, DispatchTrack customers typically see an average of 10% efficiency gains through its optimised routing.
“DispatchTrack’s real-time visibility dashboard empowers furniture retailers to spot disruptions before they become a problem,” says Alex Buckley, General Manager for EMEA & APAC. “From a single screen, users can see the status of every truck, route, and order, drilling down on details as needed. The end-result is that you can spot late, failed, and incomplete deliveries easily, and act quickly to resolve the issues for your customers.
“At the same time, our comprehensive customer communication suite provides customised, branded notifications at all crucial touchpoints before, during, and after the delivery. By combining efficient deliveries with best-in-class customer experience, DispatchTrack has helped numerous furniture retailers reduce costs, increase efficiency, and position themselves for growth.”
One such retailer that has benefited greatly from the service is Furniture Village. The business has continued to grow to one of the largest independently owned furniture retailers in the UK, operating from 55 stores across the country. Delivery remains a key element of the company and since partnering up with DispatchTrack back in 2020, the routing solution has been utilised for over 150 vehicles.
Alex revealed: “Furniture Village came to DispatchTrack because their existing routing solution didn’t allow them to easily provide proactive communication and live delivery tracking to their customers. They needed to upgrade their capabilities to ensure that they could send updates and ETAs to customers while providing them with real-time tracking from the comfort of their own devices.
“With DispatchTrack’s help Furniture Village have transformed the delivery experience for customers with notification at every stage of the process, live customer tracking, proof of delivery via the driver mobile app.”
By offering a suite of customer communication and last mile visibility tools, DispatchTrack has given Furniture Village the capabilities they need to provide a delivery experience for customers that lives up to their rigorous standards—one that inspires trust and confidence by giving customers full transparency into how their orders are being fulfilled.
“Post-delivery care, driver support, and photographic proof of delivery are particularly important for big and bulky deliveries such as furniture,” Alex added. “Furniture Village has found the data captured at the point of delivery invaluable for the post-delivery care team. Drivers report any issues through a care line, enabling the team to proactively contact customers and help resolve any questions before they have a chance to escalate. The photographic proof of the delivered item in situ has also helped provide clarity in customer queries by showing whether an issue was there on delivery or happened subsequently.”
Dave Ayers, Operations Director at Furniture Village, commented on the success so far: “Furniture Village strives to make its name synonymous with “quality” all across the UK. DispatchTrack helps us extend that promise into the delivery experience – and beyond – by empowering us to optimise routes, communicate with customers, and boost visibility.”
Another example of success is through Focus Furnishing, as Alex continued: “By switching to DispatchTrack, Focus Furnishing were able to remove manual processes and paperwork, significantly boosting the flexibility and efficiency of their operations. Focus Furnishing revolutionised their operational workflows, increasing their delivery capacity by 50%, decreasing operational expenditure and improving overall profitability, all while maintaining their high service standards.”
For other furniture retailers looking to enhance their delivery offer, DispatchTrack says the process of getting involved starts with a simple consultation, as Alex explains: “We start with understanding what your objectives and challenges are in your existing set up or solution, and where you want to get to in terms of optimisation, efficiencies, customer and driver experience.
“For example, where finding efficiencies is a key objective, we look at how the DispatchTrack technology will enable retailers to do things in a more efficient way. This isn’t just routing optimisation, recently we met with a prospect who was using a routing solution that was good for them, but all the post-delivery invoicing has to be done in manually in a different system whereas in DispatchTrack we can do this automatically and therefore save time and cost.
“Additionally, all their customers were having to be called in order to arrange the delivery time, but with DispatchTrack this was able to be managed using the self-scheduling feature.”
Furthermore, DispatchTrack also offers features which help improve the customer experience as well as provide reassurances along the way. These include the ability for customers to self-schedule deliveries, concise communications about their delivery and the ability to send pre-delivery questionnaires or issue “what to expect” type videos, for more complex deliveries, as well as enabling proof of delivery to help minimise any disputes regarding potential damage.
What’s more, DispatchTrack is continually investing in its software and processes, with future plans to further enhance the two way customer SMS messaging and enable scenario based SMS messages for instances such as vehicle breakdowns, road delays or weather impacts. Integration with Whatsapp will also be another enhancement to the customer experience. During early 2024 DispatchTrack will also release version 5 (V5) of its routing engine that will enable such things shuttle runs and order prioritisation. “Delivering at the right time, every time, is what we do,” Alex said.
